Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Well QIP has kicked off and we've already had a bunch of talks. The quality of the talks so far has been very high.

Off the top of my head I can count 6 quantum bloggers sitting here in the lecture theater at QIP, so, I'm guessing all of you who aren't here will hear a lot about what's going on at the conference. We have a wireless network here so we'll be posting often I guess...

Aggie is having a party in Brisbane on Friday night. It may have something to do with the fact that a lot of us all have friends in Brisbane at the moment (but nothing to do with QIP, even though I'm sure many people at QIP may be interested in attending).

Yep, that's my plan for today. Something that has become a bit of a Quantumbiodiscs tradition has been me working on Australia Day and liveblogging Triple J's Hottest 100.

This year it has a twist, I'm working on an Australian Research Council grant and I'm actually here in Oz listening to JJJ on the radio. I've been looking forward to listening to this for a while, it's been ages since I've been able to catch up with what music has been popular in Oz.

Any of you other Oz researchers out there getting your ARC proposals lined up while listening to the J's feel free to comment on this thread!

*Warning spoiler below if you aren't in Sydney's timezone*

Oh, and here is the current list of what's been played (though I'm in Queensland which is an hour behind NSW so it's more a preview of the next 20 songs or so):

Thursday, January 25, 2007

SciRate.com is a website that allows you to rate new papers on the quant-ph arXiv each day.

How does this work?

You register with the site and everyday you go there and "SciTe" papers that you think are pretty snazzy.

Why would you want to do this?

I think Dave explained this pretty well:

"The idea came from the observation that while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume of papers was high and, to put it bluntly, the quality of these papers was not necessarily so great. So the question became, how do I do something to filter out the arxiv? Now, of course, everyone will want a slightly different filter. One person’s noise might be indeed another persons operatic masterpeice. But there should be a way to produce at least “some” kind of filter based on the quality of the work. And certainly computers aren’t smart enough to do this filtering (okay that’s a challenge to all you AI people out there!) And using citations is too slow. But there is a group of experts out there who can do pretty good filtering…"

The website looks kinda bare-bones, is it finished yet?

Not by a long shot. There's a bunch of stuff that will be happening to it in the next few weeks (after QIP). If you have any ideas, let Dave know at the new SciRate blog. Oh, and keep your eyes on the SciRate website for new updates and new features...

Friday, January 19, 2007

There has been a bit of an outcry about John Howard's little holiday in Broome earlier in the week, which I think Tim Dunlop summed it up best. Essentially, Tim points out that this episode should be a little worrying for members of Liberal party as it displays a lapse in political judgement.

Over at LP, Mark wrote an interesting piece yesterday about the potential consequences for the Liberal Party of Howard losing the election later this year. He pointed to the potentially massive leadership vacuum and a complete lack of policy clarity that that would be exposed. On that thread I commented that I think that if the the Libs should lose then they should take the opportunity to promote generational change by backing someone like Malcolm Turnball to be the new leader.

This highlighted to me an interesting question. How stable will the Liberal Party leadership be if they win the election? They will be stuck with a leader that will be looking increasingly old against a shadow cabinet from the next generation, which will be rapidly gaining political experience. If they win, and they persist with Howard, then they will in all likelihood lose the following election and find themselves in opposition for an extremely long time. Essentially, they will have to ditch Howard if they win.

This point was raised by Tim Dunlop during the leadership spat between Costello and Howard last July. As Tim said, Howard is a lame duck. If he isn't too old for the job now he will be by 2010. A point surely not lost by the Labor Party. Labor has done its time in the wilderness, they have to demonstrate to the electorate that it's time for the Liberal Party to do the same.

Well, here I am writing a post in Singapore airport. I'm testing whether my laptop survived the trip after some moron dumped their gigantic carry on bag square on top of it.

What happened to the airlines getting all serious about carry-on baggage? Actually, they are serious enough if you are a half-savvy twenty something. However, you'll get off scot free if you are pushing 70 and are so out of it that it would take more than the allocated 5 minutes to explain why Qantas will slug you 400 bucks for taking that 15 kilo monster on board when the Deutsch Bahn has been letting you get away with it for 30 years.

OK, mick, chill. Take a sip out of your delicious and refreshing pineapple-orange beverage.

Interesting point to note. This juice cost me 4 Australian dollars. It would have cost me 2 Euro if I'd paid in Euros. I guess this means that the Australian dollar is worth shite.

While I'm writing this I'm sitting in a juice bar in Singapore International Airport. I like this airport. I like that it has lots of nice places to get a drink. I like that the people are friendly and that everything is quite clean. Mostly, I like that I can walk outside hear and feel the heat, it's almost worth the cost of the plane ticket to feel that. During winter in Innsbruck it is so hard to feel thoroughly warm. Sure, everywhere has heating, but you can feel the earth and the atmosphere just sucking that heat away. But when you get to these parts you feel the warmth and it's everywhere, I'm sure after a few days in Brisbane I'll feel that it's inescapable - I guess in the same way that the cold is in Innsbruck.

Unfortunately, I won't post this till I arrive in Brisbane sometime tomorrow, it turns out that you have to fork out the bucks to use the wireless here. Well, either that or I could have brought a cable and it would have been free...

Take note Euro visitors to QIP: If you flying through Singapore, bring and ethernet cable and you can hook yourself up to the web!

Friday, January 12, 2007

On Sunday I'm off on a bit of an adventure, I'm flying back home to Oz. The main reason that I'm heading home is to attend QIP 2007 but I'll be doing about a thousand other things before and after the conference.

I always enjoy the flight home. I've had all sorts of hellish journeys over the years but very little shakes my enthusiasm for that high that I get when Brisbane's humidity wraps around me as I step out of the plane. This time around I fly from Innsbruck to Frankfurt, then a long haul to Singapore (and drinks in the Cactus Bar), and the final haul from Singapore to Brisbane. I leave on Sunday night and arrive early on Tuesday morning. It's going to be so nice to chill out on that flight and to spend some time drinking Bundy and watching some movies.

Speaking of Bundy, how much do people want to bet that I head straight for the Duty Free to buy a couple of bottles to share with my brother and sister? Next week will be the first time that my entire family has been in the same city for 2 years. The last time I was home my brother was in Canada and my sis was in the UK.

I think the only downside to all this is that my girlfriend is stuck in Innsbruck doing exams.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

In what might seem to some to be an obvious statement, George Bush is not America. Not now, nor ever. George Bush is quite simply the man who has been elected President. American presidents come and go, America itself has stuck around for quite a while.

This is a point that Tim Dunlop has been pushing, quite rightly, this week at Blogocracy. The Australian Government and the media keep toeing the line that Australia's relationship with American is all about the relationship between George Bush and John Howard. They seem to ignore the fact that George Bush is now a deeply unpopular president pursuing deeply unpopular policies and that Australia's best interests are not necessarily served by having a close relationship politically or personally with Bush.

Last year the American public demonstrated their distaste for George Bush's foreign policy in the congressional elections. If George Bush doesn't have the capacity to understand this then maybe his "friend", John Howard, should help him out by not supporting his push for a "surge" in Iraq.

Whoops: I accidentally stole my title from one of Tim's earlier posts on this topic.

My "Recent comments" widget on my sidebar doesn't seem to be working so well at the moment. However my normal comments are working fine.

I think this probably has something to do with switching to the new Blogger. My comments are managed by Haloscan and over at there forum it seems that people are reporting a bunch of bugs mainly to do with people that have multiple sidebar widgets (people like me). With some luck everything will be back to normal in a few days - either that or I'm going to have to switch to a new Blogger template and start hacking all over again....

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Word is that the leader of the Australian Greens, Bob Brown, has approached the ALP in an attempt to get a preference deal for this year's federal election. Brown is pushing the line that the ALP either does a deal with the Greens, with the hope of ALP preferences giving them the balance of power, or faces the prospect of a hostile Coalition-led Senate if the ALP takes the lower house.

The Greens are going to have to suppress their instinct to attack anyone who moves to the right of Gandhi if they hope to get a deal with the ALP.

Arnie has a new plan for near universal health care for Californians. Did I ever mention that I really like California? Of all the places that I've been to over the years California was one of the nicest.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Apparently there was a UFO sighting at O'Hare Airport in November. Some United Airlines staff spotted a disc shaped object hovering over the terminal which apparently freaked them out enough to inform the control tower (which couldn't see anything).

Anyway, I'm not so interested in the whole UFO thing but I am interested in what one O'Hare union official, Craig Burzych, said about it,

"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable".

Someone should find this man a place in the Democrat party, they need more people with a wit like that!

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Peter Garrett, the ALP's new spokesman for climate change, environment and heritage wrote an awesome op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald today.

Garrett rightly takes issue with the governments bizarre view that introducing nuclear power stations to Australia is a valid approach to combat climate change. While it's true that nuclear power involves no carbon emissions, and that Australia has an abundance of uranium, Australia has no infrastructure for a nuclear power industry and the government's own investigating panel suggests that it will take until 2050 for 25% of Australia's electricity needs to be met by a nuclear power industry.

This timeframe is far from acceptable and it is only achievable with a significant amount of financial assistance from the government. Cheaper alternatives to nuclear power exist that can be implemented in the near future. The government has to stop protecting their friends in the mining industry and start thinking hard about how Australia will meet it's future energy needs.

It appears that over the holidays I was tagged by Dave so I guess I better play along:

So the game is, take the closest book to you right now, go to the fifth sentence on page 123, write the following three sentences in the blog, and tag three people.

I'm at work so, surprise surprise, the book closest to me is "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information" by Michael Nielsen and Ike Chuang. So, writing the three sentences that follow the fifth on page 123,

"The idea is that at the beginning of the computation, the Turing machine is in the starting state q_s. The execution of the computation causes the Turing machine's internal state to change. If the computation ever finishes, the Turing machine ends up in the state q_h to indicate that the machine has completed its operation."

How geeky was that, I landed smack bang in the middle of an introduction to Turing machines! Still, that's a pretty interesting way of starting my working year. Now, for the tagging of others: